An inversion layer at daybreak: the high whine of tires on asphalt rings in my ear. The sky grows dark again, but it’s only a mizzle.
The house finch tries to fit everything into a five-second burst of song, purple among the purple twigs of silky dogwood.
A quiet Sunday morning, frost like a pall, and a pair of nuthatches in querulous dialogue about—who knows?—the taste of frozen bugs.
Dawn. In absolute silence, a pileated woodpecker hitches its way up a locust trunk, silhouette pivoting like a pawl on an invisible ratchet.
An incessant scolding from the springhouse: a Carolina wren perches in the tiny, prison-like window, crossed by a single bar of sunlight.
Somewhere above the clouds, a military jet heads north: a gray sound on a gray day. In the newly bare lilac, yellow wires of bindweed.
High winds stir the trees like surf, a dead branch crashes every few minutes, but the small birds still forage, twittering in the birches.
A true November day, cold and gray and wet. Patches of pale lichen on tree trunks glow like dim headlights in the fog. A distant chickadee.
A juvenile buck chases a much larger doe through the laurel, knobs for antlers and his grunts still half-bleat. The damp woods glistening.
At 7:30 a raven flaps over, cronking. Ten minutes later, a maelstrom of crows and ravens in the woods beside the powerline: fresh gut pile.
By midmorning, all the white crosses left by jets have disappeared into another cloudless sky. A soft bang as a junco side-swipes a window.
When I turn to go in, I’m struck by the cherry tree’s shadow, how the sun divided by the forest canopy multiplies each branch by three.
One grown fawn attempts to nurse; the other runs into the woods, ducking its head as if pursued by some horsefly impervious to the cold.
A finger of sun infiltrates the foxtail millet, heads turned every direction but up. Three chickadees forage in the cherry, comparing notes.